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Chris F. Masse November 23rd, 2006

You can see the strange alliance forming in the comment area of Robin Hanson’s first blog post here, at Midas Oracle. (Eric Zitzewitz seems ecstatic; we’ve never seen him like that. Like a dog finding a black truffle. Or like a pig finding a white truffle. But let’s not confuse the two: the white truffle is a condiment, whereas the black truffle is like a pungent and pricey mushroom.)

So what could be next is these two guys co-authoring a proposal paper, and they will corner their critics: “put up or shut up”.
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Robin Hanson’s responded to my comment:

Chris, if you are right that “the term ‘prediction market”, it is well understood by people as “a market that floats a prediction”, then we should of course use another name for any different concept. A survey to help us learn about such perceptions would be useful here.

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And Robin Hanson responded to Jason Ruspini (a taxonomy skeptic –shame on you, JR):

If a fish market would not exist had not a marine biologist created it in order to sample fish, well then yes I might call it a fish sampling market.

Distinctions have different uses to different people in different contexts. To let all these flowers bloom, we should create terms for the different concepts, so we do not confuse each other when we talk.

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I agree with that last sentence.

Speaking of creating different terms, and providing that I’m right about the definition of “prediction market” (”a market that floats a prediction“), of which Robin Hanson said that a survey is needed, what about these variations:

- Speculation-oriented prediction market;

- Hedging-oriented prediction market;

- Forecast-oriented prediction market;

- Decision-oriented prediction market;

- Entertainment-oriented prediction market;

- Education-oriented prediction market.

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And we come back to not-so-shameful-after-all Jason Ruspini’s comment:

Distinctions might help with regulatory issues, but I generally don’t find taxonomies to be very productive.

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Previous Blog Posts:

- Prediction Markets Definitions - REDUX

- Prediction Markets Definitions - by Robin Hanson - 2006-11-21

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING. GOBBLE, GOBBLE.

Tags: Eric Zitzewitz, Jason Ruspini, Robin Hanson, ThanksGiving

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